Intelligence Communication in the Digital Era: Transforming Security, Defence and Business

Emerging information and communication technologies promise to fundamentally change how analysis is produced and used by key customers in the coming years. A major transition is just getting underway as producers of analytic products shift from delivering static, hardcopy narrative papers to relying increasingly on more dynamic, digitally-based modes of presentation. Tomorrow’s intelligence consumer will be increasingly inclined to seek information and analytic insights in digital and interactive formats. The ability of producers of analysis to adapt intelligence deliverables meet this challenge could well determine whether such analytic units remain competitive in an era of digital communication.

Communication is one of the cornerstones of the intelligence process, and recent developments in multimedia communication are likely to have a major impact on how intelligence analysis is presented to the user of the intelligence product. Digital communication is driving deep changes in the way information is produced and consumed globally and across industries, posing challenges to how intelligence analysis is delivered from the perspective of both the producer and the consumer. These changes will affect the concepts of usability, user experience, interaction design, and information design. Although intelligence agencies have their own distinctive features in relation to intelligence clients at the corporate level as well as certain security standards and counterintelligence imperatives to guarantee, they will need to adapt their intelligence products to the digital era to remain competitive.

Modern-day drafters of analysis must develop presentational tradecraft skills to meet customers’ expectations that every product will have one or more accompanying visuals to supplement static narrative. Analysts must design a product with photos, maps, links, and interactive elements from the start and package the story for maximum relevance, retention, persuasion, and retrieval. The CREATE framework, which focuses on customer relevance and ease of use, can help analysts conceptualize products that take full advantage of digital communication. By applying some basic storytelling principles of design and persuasion to their presentational tradecraft while using the CREATE model, analysts can make analytic products more pleasing and more memorable to the customer.

The Intelligence Community (IC) in both the United States and Canada have been trying to heed the demands of intelligence consumers with a product that provides full, true, and plain disclosure but may lack the crucial ingredient of “affect” to effectively communicate risk. This chapter proposes some simple measures in the field of risk analysis which could compensate for the consumer’s innate heuristics and risk perception factors. The goal is an analytic product with more impact because it engages both experiential and analytic thinking in dealing with risk perception and communicating risk.

New digital technologies are opening the door to establishing of a new paradigm of collaboration for producing and delivering intelligence analysis to decision makers. With the use of web-based wikis, analysts can draft articles jointly, blurring the lines between all-source analysts, collectors, and even decision makers. Access to drafts and finished products can be defined at several levels by varying who is given the authority to “read” or “write” in the document. Key supplemental information can be presented through pop-ups, side bars, or hyperlinks. This would allow the reader to focus on what is most important, including the use of structured analytic techniques. Avatar-based collaboration platforms would also facilitate greater interaction and collaboration, allowing analysts to coordinate and brief their papers without ever leaving their desks.

Actionable intelligence arises when the decision maker is convinced to execute on the recommendations provided in intelligence reports. This means that intelligence analysis must be communicated in a manner that will convince management to take action. This chapter summarizes lessons learned from a review of practitioner-oriented articles found in the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) literature (primarily Competitive Intelligence Magazine and CI. Insight), Global Intelligence Alliance (GIA) research, and conference papers from CI practitioner conferences. The objective is to better understand how the competitive intelligence field views the communication element of the intelligence process and, more importantly, how to make communications more effective. The author draws on his own experience as an intelligence researcher (academic) and consultant over the past 20 years.

Efforts to reform intelligence analysis have been motivated by the assumption that accurate analysis naturally leads to effective policy decisions. From this perspective, computational resources have primarily been devoted to the collection and assessment of empirical data in an effort to provide consumers with increasingly accurate predictions. By challenging the assumption that consumers welcome the predictions offered by intelligence analysts, a new perspective emerges regarding the ways in which the intelligence community may employ computational resources to develop increasingly useful and trusted analytic products and tradecraft. A new, model-centric analytic tradecraft that combines the computational resources of Big Data analysis, Agent-Based Models of artificial societies, and increasingly sophisticated and personalized human computer interaction technologies offer new opportunities to transform the relationship between intelligence producers and consumers.